Chapter Seventy-three

‘Holyshitwhatthefuck!’ I blurted the words out.

If I told an AI image generator to consume some LSD then create a background image of nebulas for a planetarium in the style of H. R. Giger, the result might have come close to the endless, kaleidoscopic nightmare-space the Spirit World turned out to be. It was depressingly dark and joyfully colourful at the same time — the epitome of weirdness as far as I was concerned. And I wasn’t even seeing it with eyes. I was seeing it through ten tentacles — which wasn’t anything new — but with no land, no sky and no horizon, orientation was sketchy at best.

I couldn’t really tell if my tenties were all pointing the same way or not — things like directions or distance didn’t have a presence here, and in the absence of anything I could use as a point of reference, it took me a couple of seconds to come to terms with this infinite space and the seemingly unmoving backdrop of … stuff.

‘What? You don’t like it here?’ the familiar voice of a certain goddess came to me, and strangely enough it helped me gather my focus.

‘Is this … the Spirit World then?’ I asked the stupidest question possible. Wensah decided it didn’t warrant an answer. ‘How can anyone bear to live here?’

‘Huh! If you haven’t been anywhere else, this is quite pleasant,’ she said, her voice filled with distaste.

‘And if you have?’ I hazarded the question.

‘Then you might not want to spend your every waking hour here.’ The reply came.

Yeah, that made sense. Spirits only had waking hours, and I for one wanted to go back to Krissy already because sod this place. Unfortunately, I had some things to take care of, and unfortunately, I needed Wensah’s help. And speaking of Wensah … where was she? I could hear her but I couldn’t see her.

Well, she wasn’t the only thing I didn’t see. Usually some of my tenties would have some of the others in view, much like how a human would see his own arms and legs. Not this time, though, which was a little strange.

I moved one of my tentacles, and soon enough a few of the buggers were coming into view. So was Wensah.

Wensah? Was it really her?

I might have got too used to her perfect human appearance, because the monstrosity that was slowly swimming into my tentie’s field of vision was anything but that, and I had a hard time believing it was her.

‘Is … that you?’ I asked the giant, six-armed … no, at least eight-armed, humanoid colossus made of blue and red spirit-stuff, hovering in the middle of nothing an undetermined distance from me.

‘Can you see anyone else around here?’ her sweet, feminine voice echoed in my mind while spreading two of her monstrously long spirit-arms out as if presenting herself.

Encouraged by her usual snark, I moved all my tentacles to get a better look at her as well as everything else in this fever-dream world, including myself.

It was a mistake.

The so-called avatar I had in the material realm was kind of cute and did nothing to prepare me for the moment I looked into the proverbial mirror.

Observation number one: I was still a Tentacle Horror, and the horror part of it was beginning to make sense. I was of a mind to scream and run from myself.

My tentacles were nothing like the thin, danger-noodles my worldly avatar had — the real ones were reminiscent of those of a kraken. They were long, thick at the base where they joined my body, gradually tapering to a pointy end. Instead of being spotted with suckers like any ordinary kraken would have it, my appendages had curved spikes jutting out of them, because why just grip and constrict when you could also lacerate your prey at the same time. Fucking tentacle horrors!

Observation number two: my body. I was looking at an uneven, pear-shaped abomination, something like a balloon that was being squeezed. The blue, translucent surface was riddled with enough small dents and craters to compete with the moon. And as if that hadn’t been enough, spirit-tendrils covered the entire thing like the vines of some creeper plants.

The worst part was that I finally found something to use as a reference to determine sizes and distances.

My soul. My human soul.

In a large crater that looked like the maw of a sandworm sat my soul, embedded into the Tentacle Horror as if it had sunk chest deep into quicksand or something. A white, human shaped mass of spirit-stuff in a pit of blue. Only the head and shoulders were out into the open, and to my horror, some of the spirit-tendrils pierced it, entered it and spread inside it like parasitic roots.

I was just staring at myself, my mind struggling to comprehend what it was seeing.

Observation number three: size. Based on my human soul — which in my experience always corresponded to the size of the body it belonged to — the Tentacle Horror was as large as a double-decker bus. And that led to observation number four: if I was a double-decker bus, then Wensah was friggin’ Buckingham Palace. The damned goddess was huge. And not very competent. When she had mentioned soul-surgery, I had been imagining something more … surgical. Not this mess. For god’s sake, my soul looked like it got caught and cocooned by the xenomorphs from Aliens.

And on that note:

‘Wensah, aren’t human souls supposed to be teal? Why is mine white?’

‘Because you’re stupid,’ she said. Of course. Why had I even expected anything else than name-calling? But to my surprise, she followed it up with an actual answer. ‘Also because Essence in your world condenses more when forming a soul, that’s why. Trust me, I would have picked anyone in this world over you, but their souls aren’t as firm. Wouldn’t have survived bonding to any spirit, let alone a Tentacle Horror.’

‘Bonding? Alright. So, is it this bonding thing that’s the problem? Is it like … don’t know. Coming apart or something?’

‘Coming apart? Really? Do you hear yourself?’ Wensah scoffed.

‘Alright, listen, just pretend for a moment that I don’t know anything about souls and spirits.’

‘I don’t have to, you don’t know anything.’

‘Then start fucking explaining, will you? So I can understand what’s going on.’

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As always, I was losing my patience with Wensah. Her ginormous body floated closer to my revolting self, and she made a sound that imitated a sigh filled with exasperation. I moved a few more of my tentacles, bending them around so I could take a closer look at myself from different angles.

‘Well, this isn’t how you were last time I checked,’ Wensah said. ‘You’ve been growing too fast while damaging yourself, and the remnant of the Tentacle Horror itself seems to be trying to rebuild itself.

‘Didn’t you say the critter was gone?’ I asked, recalling my first interaction with the goddess.

‘I said you were in control,’ she corrected me.

‘Great. So, how do we keep it that way?’

Wensah stopped moving towards me — a tremendously large shadow of doom looming over me — then she stretched out an arm and brought it so close to my Tentacle Horror body that I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. She didn’t touch me though, and after a few moments, I realised that just as I wasn’t really seeing but sensing things with my tentacles, it was probably the same for her and she was using her fingers to have a look. Spirits were weird.

‘Alright, stupid, start explaining what you’ve done here,’ she said angrily.

‘Uhm … what do you mean?’

What I’d done? Wasn’t this all her handiwork? Then she pointed at a spot on my body. I pulled a tentacle closer to see better and I realised the spot wasn’t on me but inside me. And now that I was looking, really looking, I saw a spiritual … organ? Construct? Something.

‘That’s Jack’s Room,’ I informed her. ‘I can store physical things in there.’

‘I see,’ she said, then she pointed at something else. ‘And that?’

‘That’s a secondary Essence Pool, and before you ask, that third thing almost next to it is the Spirit Room. To store materials made of modified Essence.’

‘I see,’ she said.

Being so large and so close to me, I couldn’t really see her head, but I was sure she was shaking it in disapproval. On the other hand, I finally got to have a look at my real body and all it contained. And now that I was here, reunited with myself, I could feel something was wrong, and it wasn’t just Mr Instinct trying to take over.

‘Is there a problem?’ I asked innocently, fully expecting a barrage of insults and a long list of my wrongdoings.

Wensah of course didn’t disappoint.

‘You stupid, ignorant fool. This wouldn’t have happened if you had just stayed put on that island and kept collecting Essence for the rest of your life. You absolutely, undeniably, astonishingly idiotic human soul!’ she growled at me.

Normally I would have just ignored her tirade, but considering she could literally squat me like a fly with one hand, and my body was experiencing technical difficulties that needed fixing, I decided I should take her seriously.

‘Alright, point taken, I know nothing about spirit-things. So, what have I done wrong, and how do we fix it?’ I asked with a tone as calm and professional as I could make it.

‘What have you done wrong? What haven’t you?’ she wailed. ‘And we are not going to fix it.’

‘We’re not? Why?’ I asked, deadly anxiety falling on me like a bomb.

‘Because I’m done pampering you, so this time you are going to fix the problems you created yourself,’ she snarled. ‘And if you can’t, then I guess I will start looking for a new familiar for my darling Krissintha. She is so much more reasonable than you. Why, for all the Essence in existence, couldn’t she have a soul like those in your world?’

Oh shit oh shit oh shit! I knew I had to say something in my defense and I had to say it quickly, before Wensah would turn around and leave. And this wasn’t the time to argue, or to point out that all this had started with her, not with me. I took a deep mental breath, and forced the best forgery of humility and repentance on myself that I could find in me.

‘I’m … sorry, Wensah, I wasn’t born a spirit, I’m human. Sort of. This is all new to me,’ I began, choosing my words carefully. ‘I promise I’ll do my best to fix this, alright? Just give me some pointers, or at least explain what I’ve done wrong. And maybe some extra pointers to avoid future mistakes? That’s not too much to ask, is it?’

Wensah hummed thoughtfully for a moment or two, then said,

‘Alright. Listen carefully, because I’m not going to say things twice.’

***

‘… and that’s why you’re not likely to survive longer than the next few days.’ Wensah concluded her lecture on the anatomy of my Tentacle Horror body and the spectacular way in which I had fucked it up.

Great. That was just great. I was literally on the brink of dying, the Tentacle Horror — a.k.a Mr Instinct — was in panic mode, trying to fix things by attempting to take back control, and Wensah had made it clear she was not going to do anything to fix it.

‘Alright. I think I understand, and I think I know what to do,’ I said, finding it difficult to feign any confidence. Because I had almost no idea what to do.

‘Good. I’ll be back in two days. That should be enough for you to either fix this mess or to give in to the Tentacle Horror and disappear,’ she said. ‘What a wasted opportunity. I should have picked a better soul.’

And with that last statement, she vanished. Damn goddess! As if this wasn’t her fault to begin with. Sure, I had made all sorts of illegal modifications to the poor, tentacle-critter, but what had she expected would happen without her explaining anything to me in the first place? She could have at least given me the basic rundown of how things worked when I had first woken up in this world — not a complete Tentacle Horror User Manual, but something more than “Collect Essence or I’ll kill you.”

But that was then, this was now, and now was different. Now she had taken the time and effort to walk me through how this particular spirit was supposed to function, and how it was all sorts of doomed because of my haphazard building projects.

The way I understood Wensah’s explanations, two main issues needed to be dealt with urgently.

The first was my body.

Setting aside the question of how consciousness worked and where was mine located, all my senses had been residing in my avatar body from the moment of my awakening as a Tentacle Horror, and I’d had almost no awareness of my actual body in the Spirit World. Until now. I suspected it was some sort of misguided precaution on Wensah’s part, but that was besides the point.

Building Jack’s Room, my Secondary Essence Pool and the Spirit Room was like a bricklayer building a house using a remote controlled robot while blindfolded. I’d been mucking about in the dark, consuming spirit-stuff, sending it through the Black Essence Portal and slamming these rooms together without much understanding. Thinking back, all those hints and tips from Mr Instinct had been attempts to prevent me from wrecking our shared body completely. We were still alive and in one piece, but I had done more shoddy modifications and additions to our body than what a Tentacle Horror could handle during its natural growth. We were bursting at the seams.

The second issue was Mr Instinct.

Mr Instinct — quite understandably — seemed to have had enough of my reckless expansionism, and decided to take matters into its own tentacles. At first it had been the subtle hints or occasional feelings of resistance from it. Then, my culinary tour of the ork galley had happened, and Mr Instinct had managed to commandeer a substantial amount from the consumed souls not only to start building itself up and gain strength, but to form some of those vine or root-like things and stick them into my soul.

Now, some of those vine-things had been made by Wensah — they connected my soul’s every node to the Tentacle Horror’s body, giving me full control over it. They were orderly affairs, more like electrical wiring than roots, unlike the new ones Mr Instinct had sent my way. The new ones looked creepy, and some of them had reached a few of my nodes already. I supposed that was the reason I could actually hear Mr Instinct in my mind, demanding I eat more so it could create more of the roots, and eventually have me under its control and stop the madness I represented — from its point of view.

Mr Instinct was easy to find. Just as I had a location within the Tentacle Horror — my human soul — the critter had one, too. I followed the root-like wires all the way to something that seemed like a node at first glance, but it was bigger, and on closer inspection turned out to be a small, spiritual soul-brain type thing — well, for the lack of a better way to put it.

‘No!’ Mr instinct protested the moment it realised I’d found it.

‘No what?’ I asked.

‘No!’ it shrieked at me.

Waves of … something washed over my soul, something like an invisible hand trying to restrain me, trying to exert control. I imagined Mr Instinct was seeing the sword hanging over its metaphorical head and it was doing whatever it could to prevent its own demise. Luckily it was not yet powerful enough to control me.

Out of the two main issues, this was the easier one to solve. It would take some effort — and probably a lot of pain — but I could crush Mr Instinct and be done with it.

But I wasn’t sure what the consequences of that action would be. And fixing my body afterward would be a challenge, to put it mildly. Plus, I was kind of used to the naggy little asshole anyway, so I was inclined to look for an alternative solution before pressing the red button. I had two days before Wensah’s glorious return, so it was time to start working on that alternative solution.

Damn, being a pushover sucked. I was too nice for my own good.